Beyond Compare 5 for LINUX
Release Notes

CONTENTS
1) SUPPORTED FEATURES
2) REQUIREMENTS
3) INSTALLATION
4) CONTEXT MENUS
5) NOTES
6) Registering

SUPPORTED FEATURES

Basic Functionality

Beyond Compare for Linux currently supports directory and file comparisons as well as the standard copying, deleting, renaming, merging, and syncing features provided by the Windows version.

KDE Theming

Beyond Compare for Linux supports the theme and styling features for Qt5. KDE, a popular desktop environment, allows for customization of Qt's styling options.

Beyond Compare for Linux will run under other desktop environments, such as Gnome and XFCE, but will not follow the styling engine.


REQUIREMENTS

1) Qt5 runtime library (included in this installer for 64-bit packages)
	Beyond Compare for Linux was written using the Qt5 widgetset.
	Support for KDE styles and themes is an added advantage for
	this route.
2) libQt5Pas.so.1 library file (included in this installer)
	This file is required for mapping the Qt5 library calls to
	Pascal functions and procedures, from which Beyond Compare
	is written.
3) Compatible Linux Distributions

  Compatible with no tweaks required:
  - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, 9
  - Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, 22.04 LTS, 24.04 LTS
  - Linux Mint 20, 21, 22 Cinnamon Edition
  - Fedora 40, 41
  - Debian 11, 12

INSTALLATION

0) install libraries if required

The .deb and .rpm packages are set up to install any required dependencies automatically when a package manager tool such as yum, apt-get, etc are used.  Therefore if a package management tool is used for installation no further action will need to be taken.  However, if rpm or dpkg tools are used or if Beyond Compare is installed using the .tar.gz package then dependencies will not be handled automatically and the user will need handle the dependencies.

If you use a package manager (such as yum) that handles dependency checking and installation you can narrow the list down to:

RHEL/Fedora:
	RHEL and Fedora workstation installs include required dependencies.

Ubuntu:
	libqt5gui5 libqt5printsupport5 libqt5x11extras5

1) extract files.
> tar zxvf BCompare_*.tar.gz

2) run install.sh
> cd bcompare-*
> ./install.sh

The default location when installing as root is "/usr." If the user does not have root privileges, Beyond Compare will be installed to the user's home directory by default.

The default installation directory can be overridden with the --prefix=[DIR] option. This is also documented with ./install.sh --help.

3) Run Beyond Compare
> $HOME/bin/bcompare  (non-root install)
> /usr/bin/bcompare   (root install)


CONTEXT MENUS

- KDE 5.0, KDE 4.0, Gnome, XFCE users

Contect Menu extensions for Konqueror, Nautilus, and Thunar are included and installed.

These extensions will place file selection options in the main menus of the file managers.  Options for the added menu items can be found in the Beyond Compare / Tools / Options top page.

The Context menu extensions will be installed as part of the Beyond Compare installation process but can be removed or re-installed manually.  The extension .so files reside in

   $BC_LIB/lib/beyondcompare/ext

where $BC_LIB is $HOME or /usr depending on root or user installation.

To install the extensions place the appropriate .so in:

	/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/qt5/plugins/	(KDE5)
	/usr/lib/kde4/							(KDE4/Konqueror)
	/usr/lib/nautilus/extensions2-0/		(Gnome/Nautilus)
	/usr/lib/thunarx-1/						(XFCE/Thunar)

For KDE the file bcompare_ext_konq.desktop also needs to be placed in:

	/usr/share/kservices5/		(KDE5)
	/usr/share/kde4/services/	(KDE4)

For GNOME, all instances of nautilus must be stopped ('pkill nautilus') and then restarted before the context menu extension is loaded.

Also on Gnome, default behaviour is to not enable menu icons.  Icons are installed for Beyond Compare menu extensions and make it much easier to use the added menu items.  Menu Icons for nautilus can be enabled through the menus as:

  System > Preferences > Appearance > Interface > Show icons in menus

or through the gnome configuration tool (gconf) as

  gconftool-2 --type bool --set /desktop/gnome/interface/menus_have_icons true



NOTES

- Check for Updates now supports proxies. Set the "http_proxy" environment variable to have Beyond Compare use a proxy for updates. To set the variable from the Bash shell, use the command:

	export http_proxy="http://server"

- You can alternatively set your path variable for calling Beyond Compare.


REGISTERING

- To register for a single user, select Help > Enter Key and paste in your license.

- To register for a single user without running BC5, save your license key in the text file

	"~username/.beyondcompare/BC5Key.txt".

- To register for all users, save your license key in the text file

	"/etc/BC5Key.txt".
